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JOURNEYS

JOURNEYS; Battle Under the Firs: The RV's vs. the Tents

Published: August 30, 2002

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A top-of-the-line RV can have a washer and dryer, a shower, a dishwasher, a full kitchen, a couple of bedrooms, a big-screen television, a DVD player, stereo, air-conditioning, heating, even a hot tub. Most of them have a slideout, an accordion room that expands out from the wall at the touch of a button. The Woolevers tried to convince me that their Class A RV was relatively modest because it lacked a slideout.

''Oh, but we have everything we need,'' Mrs. Woolever said.

The other tent camper was standing in an iconic tent-camping pose, around a smoky fire pit, blowing on half-burned wood, wincing at the smoke in his eyes. Garrin Ross, 37, was camping with his father and seven children who are cousins or siblings. He was preparing sloppy Joes for dinner. I asked him if he would prefer one of those big RV's, cooking the Joes in a microwave instead of trying to coax heat from the wet wood.

''Are you kidding?'' he said. ''It's not really camping unless there's sand under your pillow and a smoky fire.''

Yes, but what about the mud, the bugs, the chill, the hard ground? ''I love it,'' he said. ''It wouldn't be camping if you didn't have to get to feel the real outdoors on your skin.''

Next to his two tents was a 35-foot RV, a Sandpiper with a slideout room, two motorcycles, and a rug of Astroturf in front of the door. It had what a lot of big RV's have these days: an SUV attached to it.

I pointed to the RV and all its toys, but I didn't have to egg Mr. Ross on. ''C'mon,'' he said. ''You don't really think that's camping.''

The RV campers said that Kalaloch is primitive, because it has no hookups. You pay your $12 a night and park, living on the juice of various generators and batteries. At dusk, the RV's have only an hour left until it's quiet time. The park service has a rule that all generators must be turned off between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.

''We get some of our biggest fights over the generator rules,'' said Bill Rohde, the district ranger for Kalaloch. ''People say, 'I came here to get a little peace and quiet, and all I can hear are generators and televisions.' You can run a satellite TV for quite a while on battery power. So it's not like all the televisions go off at 10 p.m.''

I cooked up some pasta, made a sauce of garlic, olive oil and chicken, and opened the Chianti. As I reveled in my moral superiority next to my Target tent, the sound of RV generators started to die, falling away like audio dominoes. What would they do now?

I wandered down to the Woolevers' RV. I thought there was a chance they might have the Mariners-Yankees game on, and I was curious to learn the score. But they were still having trouble getting reception.

The Woolevers told me they loved the outdoors and have been camping for more than 50 years. ''We first came here to Olympic Park in 1957, to this very campground,'' Mr. Woolever said. ''We had a pickup truck back then and slept in a tent.''

A tent?

''That was before we knew better,'' Mrs. Woolever said. She was joking. ''But seriously, there's a part of tent camping that I miss -- the closeness to nature.''

But would she ever consider going back to a tent? ''Oh, heavens no,'' she said. ''We have everything we need in there: a double bed, hot shower, big kitchen.''

Her husband agreed but admitted that there was one drawback. ''There are a lot of places we'd like to see,'' he said, ''but we can't get into those places. The RV is just too big.''

Around midnight, most of the camp sounds dissolved into a low, familiar chorus. The generators were all turned off, as were most televisions. I heard people laughing around campfires, some songs, some boisterous talk fueled by the usual liquid supplements, but mostly it was the surf, wondrous white noise, the crashing Pacific at our bedsides. We were at the edge of the continent, as far west as you can go in the contiguous United States, huddled in our domes and A-frames, our cubes and cocoons. I imagine most people slept well, lulled to sleep by the one thing that connected us all in this overnight town of strangers.

Photos: A SEPARATE PEACE -- At Kalaloch beach, rival campers in tents and in recreational vehicles maintain an uneasy truce. (Larry Davis for The New York Times)(pg. F1); WHAT SIZE IS YOUR COCOON? -- At the Kalaloch campground, the accommodations range from tents and trailers to campers and Class A motor homes, some as long as 40 feet. (Larry Davis for The New York Times)(pg. F3) Map of Washington state highlighting Kalaloch and surrounding areas. (pg. F3)